As the demand for digital programming continues to grow, cable television providers are transitioning from analog cable transmission systems to hybrid analog/digital and all-digital cable distribution systems. With this transition, the current distribution of television messages, such as commercials, from an originator (e.g., an advertiser) or distributor to one or more television broadcast facilities and/or cable television providers, does not easily allow for the insertion of personalized commercials or messages.
Conventional analog advertisement insertion systems distributed programs as NTSC video with analog cue-tones to cable headends. These analog cue-tones provided a signal for a local operator to replace a national advertisement with a local advertisement. For example, upon receiving the analog cue-tones, advertisement insertion equipment (e.g., splicers, video tape recorders, etc.) played a grouping of thirty second local advertisements. Near the end of the commercial break, the analog cue-tones received another set of cue-tones to indicate the advertisement insertion equipment to stop playing and switch back to the network feed. However, these advertisement insertion systems that use analog cue-tone systems have limited capabilities. For example, in an analog system, the insertion equipment cannot detect a program change. When a nationally broadcast sporting event goes into overtime, a low-value advertisement is usually played as originally scheduled as opposed to a high-value advertisement that could have been played.
Recently, the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers, Inc. (SCTE), Engineering Committee, Digital Video Subcommittee, developed a standard that supports the splicing of MPEG-2 streams for the purpose of Digital Program Insertion (DPI). This is described, for example, in Document ANSI/SCTE 35 2004, entitled “Digital Program Insertion Cueing Message for Cable,” which is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety. As described, SCTE 35 2004 describes a technique for notifying advertisement insertion systems and advertisement splicers of upcoming splice points and other timing information in the transport stream into which a digitally encoded advertisement or other content can be inserted. More particularly, an advertisement splicer looks for a particular message packets that are encoded into an MPEG-2 transport stream and that are identified by a unique packet identifier (PID). These particular message packets indicate when splice points occur without the need for special processing. However, the SCTE 35 2004 standard does not provide an efficient approach for providing insertion instructions and/or other commands to receivers.
More particularly, there is a need to provide commands and other data which instruct the receiver as to which transport streams to present to a viewer at the receiver. For example, Visible World provides approaches for creating personalized messages (e.g., commercials, advertisements, etc.) in commonly-assigned, co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/841,465, filed on Apr. 24, 2001, which is incorporated herein by reference. The Visible World system, as described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/841,465, is used to provide multiple advertisements, multiple media segments, and other media content at the same time, over multiple programming streams and enables headends and/or receivers to decide which of the plurality of programming streams to present to a viewer in a given break in any programming signal. Again, the SCTE 35 2004 standard does not provide an approach for providing insertion instructions and/or other commands to receivers.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide systems and methods that overcome these and other deficiencies of the prior art.
For example, it would be desirable to provide systems and methods that allow a television broadcast facility or headend to insert messages for receiver-based digital program insertion.
For example, it would also be desirable to provide systems and methods that allow a television broadcast facility or headend to insert marker messages to receivers that provide an approach for the receiver to know where they are in the advertisement or advertising break, and to deal with error situations (e.g., when no advertising material is present).